A Corpus-Based Study of Chunks in Applied Linguistics Research Articles

摘要

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to disciplinary variation of chunk use, but so far little has been done on chunks in the field of applied linguistics. This paper aims to explore the structures and functions of 4-word chunks in 1, 032,497 word tokens corpus of applied linguistic research articles. The analysis reveals that applied linguists tend to use more prepositional phrases with of fragments and noun phrases with of fragments. Moreover, research-oriented chunks are the most prevalent, text-oriented the next, participant-oriented the fewest. Lastly, pedagogical suggestions are put forward that students' awareness should be aroused of unique features of chunk use in applied linguistics in terms of structures and functions.